2006/7/14, Tom Hoffman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
We're holding the first ever SchoolTool development sprint next week
at the New England Linux Symposium at the University of New Hampshire
in Durham, New Hampshire, USA.
The primary goal of the sprint is to improve the SchoolTool user
interface.
Hi Tom,
When you posted an earlier mail about the SchoolTool user interface I
considered replying, but I hesitated because I wasn't sure what the
current status was. Now that there's a demo online, I have a clearer
idea.
When Infrae first started working with ST we were concerned about the
state of the user interface. J-W and I spent an afternoon analyzing
it, and the thing that bothered us most was how the navigation and the
actions were mixed together. This has changed since then, but I think
it should change more.
One of the things we considered was adding a second column for the
actions. Thus the leftmost column would be navigation - the user is
going somewhere - and the second column would be actions - what you
can do once you've arrived. We checked the window width requirements,
and it seemed possible. The majority of the ST screens have *lots* of
white space on the right.
However at EuroPython I talked with Marius and Ignas about this idea,
and they were uncertain about screeens such as the calendar, which
needs as much horizontal space as it can get. Also I heard something
about a mega-spreadsheet in last week's meeting log. One could argue
that the calendar is a distinct sub-application in itself. But this is
just one idea.
In the current UI, when you navigate to somewhere in the menu, the
available actions - if any - appear down below in a second menu. This
is easy to miss if you're not watching the page load. Users will
certainly learn it, but IMHO it's still not optimal. For instance, it
would be good to indicate to users where they are at a given moment by
highlighting the current location in the menu. We could highlight the
location *and* highlight the actions that appear down below, but this
still doesn't work well.
We could nest the actions in the menu. Thus if the user went to the
kitchen (to use a neutral metaphor) a nested actions menu could unfold
under kitchen:
Living room
Kitchen
---------------
make coffee
squeeze oranges
cook eggs
toast bread
---------------
Bedroom
Bathroom
This might make more visual sense to the user, but I doubt it's good
practice. We'd be mixing navigation to places and manipulation of
objects. Plus in the future it may be that the navigation is more than
one level deep:
Dining room
Kitchen
Refridgerator
Sink
Stove
---------------
fry bacon
poach eggs
---------------
Dishwasher
Bathroom
Bedroom
This could only work if we make the action menu *very* visually
distinct from the navigation items.
The best suggestion I've heard is to locate navigation along the top
of the screen where the breadcrumb trail is now, and have the actions
appear in the left column. This would keep the two completely separate
and provide two axis of activity: horizontal movement and vertical
actions.
It seems the best approach would be to do some mockups in flat html
and see what people think. Now I read that the sprint this week will
be attacking those issues. Good luck to all!
kit
--
kit BLAKE
Infrae · infrae.com · office + 31 10 243 7051
Hoevestraat 10 · 3033GC · Rotterdam + The Netherlands
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